Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Nature hates calculators.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature.

Gardening is not a rational act.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

For greed all nature is too little.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Man is by nature a political animal.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.